A Good Day, Except for the Throw-up

September 8, 2009

The title about sums it up. Hubby and I have narrowed the source of all our upset tummies to the green beans that we ate last night. The only one who escaped was Li’l Tag. He didn’t have any beans since he pretty much just eats air molecules unless he’s in a growth spurt, in which case he will eat half a restaurant.

ANYWAY, poor AlphaBoy got the worst. And yet we had a great day of school – He’s such a trooper.

Math: Learned about tally marks. He enjoyed the real-life practice of sitting at the window and tallying passing cars. He still doesn’t get the concept of the horizontal tally with every group of five, but he was having so much fun shouting, “GOT IT!” as he made his mark for each passing car that I didn’t want to annoy him. And anyway, we have a whole year…

Tallying Cars

Mathematical Rebellion:

At the start of our lesson (before the tallies) a direction on the math sheet today read, “Circle 6 of the objects in the row below.”

AlphaBoy read it, huffed, and said emphatically, “I’m not going to circle six. I’m going to circle two sets of three.”

Five in a Row (art today): Lentil

We looked at the medium that Robert McCloskey used to create his illustrations: Charcoal Pencil. We pointed the various weights of the lines – thin and light, thick and heavy. We talked about smudging.

After we finished the book I surprised him with a charcoal pencil and some paper to practice drawing. He enjoyed drawing thick, dark lines the best. He also smudged away with his fingers and a Q-tip, and also explored smudging with his nose, which I admit I did not encourage.

Smudgy Hands

Afterward we washed his hands really well so he would not smudge on the walls and the cabinets and…

Five in a Row: Lentil

Our Five in a Row book this week is Lentil, about a boy who learns to play the harmonica and likes to practice it best in the bathtub because “the tone is improved 1oo percent!” After our reading today, I gave AlphaBoy a harmonica. Would you believe I just happened to have two, brand-new, good quality kids’ harmonicas lying around? (Let’s hear it for Kindermusik!”)

I didn’t suggest playing it in the bathtub, but to my delight he thought of it himself! The tone really did improve 100%.

"His favorite place to practice was in the bathtub, because there the tone was improved one hundred percent."

Testing whether the bathtub does, indeed, improve the tone one hundred percent. We would say the tub improved it about 50 percent.